THE HOT CORNER: Getting used to game full of mistakes

by Jim Allen (Oct 22, 2009)

Mistakes are part of the game. Players who get paid hundreds of
millions of yen a year make mistakes that cost their teams games. They
drop balls, make bad throws, throw stupid pitches, have poor plans at
bat and get themselves out.

Players accept such mistakes as part of the game, but when an umpire
blows a call, why do so many managers, coaches, players and fans treat
it as criminal negligence?

We want to see contests between human beings, with games decided by
the exact interaction of each club's successes and failures. Put
umpires into the mix and the precision is suddenly lost and any blown
call impacting the game is the umpire's fault.

Pitches over the plate are called balls, runners who beat the tag
are called out and the game is no longer between two teams but between
three.

In order to ensure a win, you have to beat your opponent so
decisively that an umpire's mistake can't take it away from you. If a
game is even, the margin for error by the umpires is non-existant.

The umpires should be held accountable for their performance in the
same way players and managers are. In other words, an umpire deserves
his job as long as he's better than the best guy who is out of work.

The leagues are responsible for providing the best possible umpires
and improving the standard of their work; in other words, making sure
they enforce the rules.

While the leagues do their best to put quality umpires on the field,
they fall down horribly when it comes to actually enforcing the rules
as they are written.

The most obvious example is the phantom double play, where the pivot
man touches the bag with his foot and has the ball in his possession,
but not at the same time. He then throws to first to complete the
"double play."

Umpires allow catchers to break the rules by blocking the plate
without the ball, denying runners before the ball gets there in a
flagrant violation of the rules. This in turn leads to runners plowing
into catchers trying to knock the ball loose.

"In the States, if I'm running and I see a catcher blocking home
plate and his intention is to block me, I'm not just going to give up,"
the Yomiuri Giants' Alex Ramirez told The Hot Corner on Wednesday.

Catchers responded to potential collisions by covering up the ball
and making no effort to tag the runner. This tactic worked because
umpires took to calling runners out in collisions whether or not they
were tagged, as we saw in Monday's CL Climax Series first-stage
clincher between the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and Chunichi Dragons.

With the Swallows' Kazuhiro Hatakeyama trying to score the tying run
in 2-1 game that would send the winner on to the second stage, Dragons
catcher Motonobu Tanishige sat on the plate and buried the ball in his
mitt, covering it up so the runner would have a very hard time trying
to jar it loose.

With nowhere to slide, Hatakeyama had one choice: run Tanishige over
and hopefully knock the ball loose. Instead of taking the much smaller
Tanishige head on, he slid to the catcher's left in a vain attempt to
find a way home.

The collision, such as it was, had no impact on Tanishige, the ball
or the scoreline, but it did lead to home plate Katsumi Manabe calling
Hatakeyama out before Tanishige could tag him.

There should have been no call, but no one argued--because baseball
people are accustomed to the rules on the field being different from
those in the book.

"I think the umpires see the ball there and just assume the guy is going to be out," Ramirez said.

Asked about the play, Tanishige said: "I tagged him."

When it was pointed out that the umpire had called Hatakeyama out
before he even made a tag, Tanishige said: "OK, but I was going to tag
him," and demonstrated how he had intended to stick the mitt to the
hapless Hatakeyama.

"He never touched the base, and he wasn't going to. I could have tagged him."

But if there was no tag, why the call?

"I think he [Manabe] just got caught up in the moment," Tanishige said.